Ted and the Telephone by Sara Ware Bassett (best short books to read txt) 📕

It did not seem to occur to him that it was Ted's room as well,—the only room the boy had.

Altogether, his treasures found no welcome anywhere in the tiny apartment, and at length convinced of this, Ted took everything down and stowed it away in a box beneath the bed, henceforth confining his scientific adventures to the school laboratories where they might possibly have remained forever but for Mr. Wharton, the manager of the farms at Aldercliffe and Pine Lea.

CHAPTER II

TED RENEWS OLD TIMES

Mr. Wharton was about the last person on earth one would have connected with boxes of strings and wires hidden away beneath beds. He was a graduate of a Massachusetts agricultural college; a keen-eyed, quick, impatient creature toward whom people in general stood somewhat in awe. He had the reputation of being a top-notch farmer and those who knew him declared with zest that there was nothing he did not know about soils, fertilizers, and crops. There was no nonsense when Mr. Wharton appeared on the scene. The men who worked for him soon found that out. You didn't lean on your hoe, light your pipe, and hazard the guess that there would be rain to-morrow; you just hoed as hard as you could and did not stop to guess anything.

Now it happened that it was haying time both at Aldercliffe and Pine Lea and the rumor got abroad that the crop was an unusually heavy one; that Mr. Wharton was short of help and ready to hire at a good wage extra men from the adjoining village. Mr. Turner brought the tidings home from the mill one June night when he returned from work.

"Why don't you try for a job up at Aldercliffe, my lad?" concluded he, after stating the case. "Ever since you were knee-high to a grasshopper you had a knack for pitching hay. Besides, you'd make a fine bit of money and the work would be no heavier than handling freight down at the mills. You've got to work somewhere through your summer vacation."

He made the latter statement as a matter of course for a matter of course it had long since become. Ted always worked when he was not studying. Vacations, holidays, Saturdays, he was always busy earning money for if he had not been, there would have been no chance of his going to school the rest of the time. Sometimes he did errands for one of the dry-goods stores; sometimes, if there were a vacancy, he helped in Fernald and Company's shipping rooms; sometimes he worked at the town market or rode about on the grocer's wagon, delivering orders. By one means or another he had usually contrived, since he was quite a small boy, to pick up odd sums that went toward his clothes and "keep." As he grew older, these sums had increased until now they had become a recognized part of the family income. For it was understood that Ted would turn in toward the household expenses all that he earned. His father had never believed in a boy having money to spend and even if he had every cent which the Turners could scrape together was needed at home. Ted knew well how much sugar and butter cost and therefore without demur he cheerfully placed in the hands of his sister Ruth, who ran the house, every farthing that was given him.

From childhood this sense of responsibility had always been in his background. He had known what it was to go hungry that he might have shoes and go without shoes that he might have underwear. Money had been very scarce on the Vermont farm, and although there was now more of it than there ever had been in the past, nevertheless it was not plentiful. Therefore, as vacation was approaching and he must get a job anyway, he decided to present himself before Mr. Wharton and ask for a chance to help in harvesting the hay crops at Aldercliffe and Pine Lea.

"You are younger than the men I am hiring," Mr. Wharton said, after he had scanned the lad critically. "How old are you?"

"Fourteen."

"I thought as much. What I want is men."

"But I have farmed all my life," protested Ted with spirit.

"Indeed!" the manager exclaimed not unkindly. "Where?"

"In Vermont."

"You don't say so! I was born in the Green Mountains," was the quick retort. "Where did you live?"

"Newfane."

Instantly the man's face lighted.

"I know that place well. And you came from Newfane here? How did you happen to do that?"

"My father could not make the farm pay and we needed money."

"Humph! Were you sorry to give up farming?"

"Yes, sir. I didn't want to come to Freeman's Falls. But," added the boy brightening, "I like the school here."

The manager paused, studying the sharp, eager face, the spare figure, and the fine carriage of the lad before him.

"Do you like haying?" asked he presently.

"Not particularly," Ted owned with honesty.

Mr. Wharton laughed.

"I see you are a human boy," he said. "If you don't like it, why are you so anxious to do it now?"

"I've got to earn some money or give up going to school in the fall."

"Oh, so that's it! And what are you working at in school that is so alluring?" demanded the man with a quizzical glance.

"Electricity."

"Electricity!"

"Wireless, telegraphs, telephones, and things like that," put in Ted.

For comment Mr. Wharton tipped back in his chair and once more let his eye wander over the boy's face; then he wheeled abruptly around to his desk, opened a drawer, and took out a yellow card across which he scrawled a line with his fountain pen.

"You may begin work to-morrow morning," he remarked curtly. "If it is pleasant, Stevens will be cutting the further meadow with a gang of men. Come promptly at eight o'clock, prepared to stay all day, and bring this card with you."

He waved the bit of pasteboard to and fro in the air an instant to be certain that the ink on it was dry and afterward handed it to Ted. Instinctively the boy's gaze dropped to the message written upon it and before he realized it he had read the brief words: